Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to specifying the location of a vehicle.
Description of the Related Art
A proposed apparatus analyzes an image taken by a vehicle-mounted camera and specifies the current location of a vehicle during driving. For example, a proposed apparatus stores in advance information regarding road marking lines representing boundaries of lanes and map information including information regarding landmarks such as road surface markings and signs, analyzes a taken image to extract landmarks and road marking lines, and identify a location of highest matching with the extracted landmarks and road marking lines in a map indicated by the map information.
The prior art apparatus described above, however, analyzes the entire taken image for extraction of landmarks and road marking lines and accordingly has a problem of increasing the processing load and requiring the long time for specifying the location of the vehicle. This may lead to a problem of delayed control of steering or power output in an application that automatically controls the steering or the power output of the vehicle based on the specified location of the vehicle. This problem is not limited to the vehicle-mounted camera but is commonly found in any location specifying apparatus that analyzes an image obtained by a reflected wave of any wavelength, for example, a millimeter waveband radar or a laser to specify the location of the vehicle.